By exposing the wholesale denial of meatpacking workers’ basic rights, the new Human Rights Watch report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” provides a window into the abuses visited on far too many workers all over the United States every day.

Meatpacking workers not only do some of the most dangerous work in America, but they are also systematically denied basic protections and rights when it comes to health and safety, immigrant workers’ rights, workers’ compensation and the freedom to form a union to lift their lives. Working at breakneck speeds in the extremely dangerous and dirty work of beef, pork and poultry processing, meatpacking workers experience extraordinarily high rates of injury and death on the job. But they risk losing their jobs when they get hurt, apply for workers’ compensation or attempt to improve their lives by trying to form a union.

Employers, the report finds, are increasingly exploiting immigrant workers, a growing portion of the meatpacking workforce, by capitalizing on language barriers and circumstances where workers are unaware of their rights under the law or about the specific safety hazards of their work.

Using concrete examples of meatpacking plants such as Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, N.C., and Tyson Foods in Northwest Arkansas, the report details how workers’ human rights are violated when they attempt to form unions to address safety and health issues. Unions have a record of negotiating contracts that protect workers’ safety and health and keep low-wage workers out of poverty. Some 42 million nonunion workers in the United States say they would form a union tomorrow if given the chance, according to independent polling by Peter D. Hart and Associates.

The Human Rights Watch report recommends uniform industrywide rules to protect basic workplace health and safety; compensation benefits; strengthening enforcement of existing labor law; and enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act, new bipartisan federal legislation that would minimize many of the grueling obstacles workers currently face when they attempt to form unions.

Workers shouldn’t have to form unions and secure basic workplace protections despite the law. We need stronger enforcement mechanisms within the law to ensure workers’ fundamental human rights are upheld and respected.

Contact Bernard Pollack 202-637-5308